


a war in heaven.

by decideophobia



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort-ish, M/M, angsty, au-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 22:09:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decideophobia/pseuds/decideophobia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been a weird couple of days. He doesn’t exactly know what’s happened; all he knows is that his family is alive and well, the house is big and beautiful and constantly buzzing with the energy of his relatives, and he feels light-headedly happy and content. But he also remembers that they died. Most of them burned in a fire, and it was his fault; only Laura, Peter and Derek survived. Peter was a vigilant coma state and when he had healed and had come to again, he’d killed Laura in order to become Alpha.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a war in heaven.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know. It was supposed to be a drabble. Hahahahaha, good one.

“Derek.”

Derek curls into himself and rolls on his side, sliding the blanket up until it covers his ears, keeping his eyes tightly shut and pretending not to hear.

“Derek.”

Someone yanks the blanket off of him and the mild morning air feels cool on his skin. Sighing, Derek flops onto his back and throws an arm over his eyes. 

“Get up, lazyass.”

He groans and swats the hand away that pokes at his cheek. It’s ass o’clock, way too early to be awake, and his bed is comfortable and warm. For the last couple of years he’s barely been sleeping, hardly ever in a real bed and in some dark, seedy corner on a mattress that was more of a biotope for all things sickness and death. He wants to enjoy the luxury of this, now, basking in it. 

Derek jumps when he’s painfully jabbed between the ribs, and he sits upright. The familiar snicker is like some long lost melody to his ears.

“You’re my least favourite family member,” Derek informs Laura as he rubs at his eyes. She’s beaming at him, eyes wide and bright and full with amusement. Her hair is in a messy bun, strands of it framing her face. 

“That is too bad since you are my favourite,” she counters absolutely unaffected and sits on her knees on his bed, looking expectantly and excited. “Come on, grumpy face, you promised me you’re going on a run with me today.”

“Not at the crack of dawn.”

Laura rolls her eyes and shoves him off the bed, using barely an ounce of her strength. It’s really annoying that she’s stronger than him, always was; always been the one who pinned Derek down and watched him struggle against her grip. She had had a boyfriend and pretended one morning that she couldn’t open a jar of jam, and Derek snorted so loudly everyone had stared at him. Laura murderously, the rest of his family warningly, and Laura’s boyfriend looked nothing but confused. 

“It’s not the crack of dawn. The sun’s already up,” she says dismissively and yanks him up to his feet. “Stop whining, baby bro. I’ll give you a head start,” Laura adds and pats his cheek mockingly. “I don’t want to crush your self-confidence completely.”

“Least favourite family member,” Derek repeats as Laura walks out of his room, cackling like the mad sister she is. 

Derek takes his time getting ready, if only to annoy Laura a little.

It’s been a weird couple of days. He doesn’t exactly know what’s happened; all he knows is that his family is alive and well, the house is big and beautiful and constantly buzzing with the energy of his relatives, and he feels light-headedly happy and content. But he also remembers that they died. Most of them burned in a fire, and it was his fault; only Laura, Peter and Derek survived. Peter was a vigilant coma state and when he had healed and had come to again, he’d killed Laura in order to become Alpha. 

He remembers that his life was a shattered mess, he was alone and restless; the guilt of the past haunting him every waking and sleeping minute, his conscience reminding him of his fatal naivety, of the pain, the anger, the betrayal. He remembers his Betas and his desperate struggle to get Scott to be part of the pack and how he stopped trying to convince him, and started working with him as an independent person instead. Most of all, he remembers Stiles.

Stiles with his buzz cut and long limbs and knowing eyes and sharp tongue. Stiles with his colossal lack of self-preservation, with his fierce determination and quick wit that just drives Derek to verge of insanity, and makes him want to press Stiles against the nearest flat surface and kiss him breathless, at the same time. 

Derek hasn’t seen any of them since he woke up a couple of days ago with his family back in his life, and everything around him seems five shades lighter than it was before. Idly, he wonders what life Scott, Stiles and his Betas lead now that they’re not werewolves; now that there’s no war going on and they don’t have to fight abominations and deranged grandfathers. 

He knows something is wrong, that this isn’t his life but what is there that he can do? In fact, why should he fight it? After all, he has his family back; all of the people that mattered to him the most, they’re alive and they’re fine and they’re happy. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want this to end. No matter what it is that keeps him here—or brought him here—it doesn’t seem important now. No one’s going to miss him anyway, in the real world, where he is a burnt out shell himself, broken and dark and elusive. He might as well just give in to the sweet illusion, lets himself be delusional, surrender to the fake sense of happiness that doesn’t feel fake at all. 

Later that day he goes grocery shopping with Mom, and he can’t help but smile. Warmth spreads through his whole body, leaving tingling trails, and he wonders how this could possibly be unreal. It can’t be. Something that isn’t real doesn’t feel like that. 

Until he sees Erica. Beautiful, strong Erica. She’s wearing a sweater that’s too big for her, her hair is messy and unruly, she looks pale and frightened, and then she’s shaking. Derek catches her before she hits the ground, holds her, says her name, and she grabs his hand. When the paramedics come to get her to the hospital, she casts a thankful but somewhat confused look at him. 

Mom asks, “Do you know her?”

And he answers, “No,” and something clenches painfully in his chest. 

He sees Isaac around, with a bruise blooming across his cheekbone; eyes cast down to the floor and jerky movements as if he fears someone might strike him any second. Boyd isn’t anywhere to be found, and Scott and his bike almost get run over by Jackson and his stupid Porsche once. Lydia walks like she’s the Queen Bee; there are no Argents in town and most importantly—Stiles is missing too. 

Derek rolls the thought of going to the Stilinski house around in his head for several days in which he starts to notice things. Things that are there one second and gone the next, like he’s imagined it. One time, he walks into open, burnt out space when he steps into the kitchen and within the blink of an eye the kitchen is back, big and open and flooded with soft light from outside. He catches his eyes glow red one time, and then they’re back to blue. When he goes to refill the tank of the Camaro, he catches sight of a black SUV driving by and Gerard Argent is staring at him. Derek stiffens, and the car is gone. 

He finds himself in front of the Stilinski house on a Friday afternoon. It looks just the same but there’s no car parked in the driveway. Someone is in the house, though. Derek picks up a heartbeat and muffled, colourful curses, and he catches himself smirking a little. He doesn’t know exactly why he decided to seek Stiles out; because of course Stiles wouldn’t know him. There’s no linking part between them now, their worlds don’t cross. But Derek wanted to make sure he’s there, safe and sound. 

Derek finds himself knocking on the front door, and he doesn’t even know when he legs carried them there. He panics for a second—what is he supposed to say when Stiles opens the door? Why did he even do it? 

For help, he tells himself, yes, for help. Stiles has always been perceptive about supernatural things, maybe he could help Derek figure out what’s going on—even though Derek doesn’t really want to know. It’s safer to assure himself that he knocked to ask for help than to admit that he just wants to see Stiles’ face, to—

The door swings open, Derek’s heart stutters—and there’s a girl standing in front of him. Her dark chin-long hair falls in light waves around her face letting her big amber eyes stand out more. There are moles on her cheeks and thick eyelashes; she’s tall—smaller than him though—and gangly, a plaid shirt over a shirt that has handprints over her breasts. She looks like Stiles, she smells like Stiles and her heartbeat it just the same, and Derek helplessly stares at her. 

“Dude,” she says, her tone is the same mocking one that Stiles often addresses him with and she snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Are you just going to creepily stare at me until I throw the door in your face?”

Derek snaps himself out of his trance. “Sorry. I was looking for—Stiles?”

She frowns at him. “What kind of name is Stiles?”

“It’s a nickname,” Derek says defensively, wincing inwardly. No matter how familiar she seems, how everything about her screams, “Stiles!” in his face—it’s wrong. So, so wrong. 

She waves her hand dismissively and asks, “How come you think he’s—she?—here?”

“He,” Derek says automatically and scowls at her. He feels the pang, the strange sensation of something in him being drawn to this girl, this…Stiles-replica but at the same time he’s having a hard time not flinching away from her. She’s not right, no matter how similar she seems. “He—I—”

She makes a frustrated noise at the back of her throat. “Oh my god, dude, I don’t know what your deal is. There’s no Stiles here, I’ve never heard of one, so…?” She lets it sound like a question, as if she’s waiting for Derek to explain what’s going on.

“What’s your name?” he asks weakly. She crosses her arms in front of her chest, narrowing her eyes at him appraisingly. The same scrutinizing look, the same expression, and yet, she seems different. In a way Derek can’t pinpoint. 

“Selena.”

There a little uptick in her heartbeat. Derek rolls the name around in his head until—

“You’re not Catwoman,” Derek says, because of course there was a Batman reference in there somewhere—and Derek is only a little surprised that he remembers the name of Catwoman after Stiles had made him watch the movie once. It’s like this new world tries hard to make him believe he’s talking to Stiles, to a female version—which it clearly is—trying to make him feel familiar, safe maybe, unconcerned. He doesn’t know why this is happening. Why Stiles is a girl but a tiny voice in his mind tells him that this is even more of a distraction than anything else. It is to make him feel safe, to make him lose all doubts about this reality. Still, it doesn’t explain why this universe would make Stiles female, because Derek like Stiles just the way he is, infuriating stubbornness, awkward flailing and stinging sarcasm all wrapped up in his sinewy frame. 

She stares at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and Derek smirks and shrugs. “Never mind,” he mutters, turning to leave. There’s no sense in finding out more about her. She’s not Stiles, and Derek gets the distinct thought that the Stiles he is looking for doesn’t exist here. When he casts a glance at the name by the door, it’s not even Stilinski. It’s not the first trick this reality tries to play on him. 

“Why are you looking for him?” she calls after him, and Derek throws a look over his shoulder. She’s slightly tilted her head to the side, glancing at him curiously. Derek winces at how similar all of it is, and yet so, so wrong. 

He shrugs, trying for nonchalance. “Just making sure he’s alright.”

Derek gets in the Camaro and leaves, and it feels weirdly like relief, like his mind and body are congratulating each other for not being screwed over, for not falling for this fake similarity and familiarity of fake-girl-Stiles. 

After that, Derek starts to feel slightly unsettled. He wonders how real all of this is; ponders that maybe he should try to break out of this, no matter how he longs for his family to be alive. He doesn’t want to leave this behind, he doesn’t want to back to shame and guilt and pain; doesn’t want to stand in the middle of his burnt down childhood home. But there’s something new now, struggling just underneath his skin; a wary awareness of how strangely wrong all of this is, the jab of something like phantom pain in his gut when he saw Erica seizing or Isaac with the bruise on his face; Scott all alone, no trace of Boyd—and a girl-Stiles that Derek supposes only exists to lure him deeper into this world. It’s the key factor that is wrong about this place: Derek doesn’t want a girl, or a girl-version of Stiles with a pretty name. There’s nothing he’d want to change about him. So whoever put him into this reality obviously didn’t know that much. 

The more days pass the blurrier things get; he keeps seeing stuff for fractions of a second that disappear again, like he’s seeing through this fake world and straight into what is _real_. Part of him still refuses to believe that it’s better to get out, to fight, to break through. Maybe he’s just imagining things now that he started thinking about it. Maybe his mind is just playing tricks on him. 

Peter’s face shifts into a grimace in front of his eyes when they’re sitting at the dinner table together one evening, just for a second, and Derek has to get up and leave, feeling sick all of a sudden. He can’t go back to this; he can’t go back to Peter looking sarcastic and mocking, with a crazed and deranged expression around the edges, always raising Derek’s hackles, always keeping him on his toes. 

He can’t leave this place. He doesn’t want to.

Mom comes home from work the next day and tells how Erica’s in the hospital again after a particularly strong seizure, and that Isaac came into the emergency room last night with his body covered in dark bruises. Derek swallows down the fury he feels directed at Isaac’s father and the desperation for Erica. 

He keeps seeing Selena in town. Derek started calling her that in his head, for the simple reason that he refuses to refer to her as girl-Stiles. It’s not Stiles. It doesn’t matter how much they actually share. And then suddenly Stiles is standing right next to her, looking straight at Derek. Derek blinks—and Stiles is gone. 

He starts pushing against the veil around his consciousness that night, somehow, he tries. Wills himself to see the truth, his reality. They’re half-assed attempts, and when nothing really happens, he lies down on his bed, facing the wall, and wonders idly if anyone in the real world has noticed that he’s been gone.

Derek wakes up in the middle of the night. It’s quiet and frighteningly eerie; he’s cold and his throat is dry. He gets up and silently walks downstairs and into the kitchen to get something to drink. 

“Derek.”

He drops the glass, and the shattering is deafening in the silence. Stiles is standing in the kitchen, the real Stiles, and he his face is a mixture of several expressions: determination, desperation, surprise…fear. He exhales deeply, and Derek doesn’t dare blinking, for fear Stiles might vanish if he does. 

“Stiles?” he asks hoarsely, so much hope in his voice that he almost winces at himself. 

Stiles is unmoving. “Come back,” he says, and, “Don’t you dare giving up like that. You have to snap out of it.”

“I’m not giving up,” Derek answers defensively. Hearing Stiles’ voice floods him with relief, with warmth, with the strangest urge to wake up from this fake reality. “It’s just—”

“I don’t care what it is that you’re seeing. It’s not real, Derek, it’s not. It’s a lie. It’s fake. Nothing you see or experience is real. It’s all in your head, it’s make-believe, and it’s killing you. It’s killing you, Derek; you have to snap out of it.”

Stiles sounds so desperate, his voice is urgent but shaky, and there’s a plea in his tone, so genuine that Derek just wants to wrap his arms around him.

“Please,” Stiles says, quietly. “Do me this favour. I know it’s not easy to let it go, and I know what you’re probably seeing is a whole lot better than what’s waiting here for you but—you just have to come back. Your pack is worrying sick about you, and even Scott is concerned about you, and I—”

_You?_ Derek wants to ask, _what about you?_

“I—I just need you to come back, okay? Who else am I going to have witty banter with? Lydia’s not the answer; she only keeps trying to outsmart me. Plus, I need you to glower Jackson into submission every once in a while, otherwise he’s getting unbearable.”

Derek huffs out a laugh at that. His breath catches in his throat though, when Stiles comes closer and slides his hands over Derek’s cheeks, open palms hot against his skin, and Derek can’t help but shiver a little.

“Wake up. Or I’m gonna throw cotton balls at you until you bleed, and trust me, that won’t be fun for you.”

Derek closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again, he feels like he’s been hit full speed by a freight train. He’s sitting on a cold floor with his back against a wall and his hands are shackled to the wall over his head. It’s freezing, he’s freezing, and he hurts all over. He doesn’t know where he is; he doesn’t even really remember how he got here or what’s going on. It’s all hazy and fuzzy. He groans hoarsely. There’s a stale taste on his tongue when he swallows, and his mouth is so dry it hurts a little. 

“I’d like to see you try,” he mutters, his voice breaking, and Stiles lets out a squeaky noise that somehow sounds like relief and joy. 

“Thank god, you’re back,” Stiles breathes, and then there are gentle fingers on his wrists, loosening the shackles.

He doesn’t know what happens next, because everything goes dark.

It takes him a couple of days to regain his full strength. Deaton said it was a close call and that Derek should rest. Erica tells him that it was faeries, the vicious kind, that feed people’s desires, the deep ones, make them seem real but draining life energy from their victims in order to strengthen themselves. Derek wasn’t the only one they had found there, in the hide-out, and the other victims, the ones who made it, are in the hospital now. Scott’s mom says they’re doing fine. 

Stiles drops by unannounced, and Derek feels the comfort he hadn’t felt around Selena, even though their smell, their heartbeats, their demeanour were the same. Derek relaxes a little more, and the uneasy sensation that was tingling underneath his skin the past few days eases out completely when Stiles settles next do Derek on the couch. 

They sit in silence and drink the coffee Stiles brought. It’s soothing, really, and the pang of pain and regret Derek had felt when he first came to again after his rescue gets smaller and smaller. The last couple of days have been a little difficult, with the image of his happy family fresh in mind. But Stiles was right, it wasn’t real, it was only something made up of his deepest yearnings. 

“How are you feeling?” Stiles asks eventually, leaning back against the rest and resting his head against the cushions. He turns a little to look at Derek. 

“I’m fine,” Derek answers and puts his coffee down on the table in front of the couch.

There’s another stretch of silence.

“What made you snap out of it?” Stiles asks quietly, folding his hands over his abdomen and resting his right ankle on his left knee. He turns his assessing look on Derek again, sharp and bright, and Derek wants to trace the bow of his lips with his own. 

Derek says, “I didn’t want to leave, really but you were right, it was make-believe and no matter how hard I tried to believe into it, to will it to be real, it wasn’t. It felt right but at the same time it felt…wrong.”

He feels like he doesn’t make sense but Stiles nods a little, like he understands, so he continues, “Isaac was still with his father, and Erica was seizing badly. I couldn’t find Boyd; Scott was alone, and Jackson…well. When I went to find you—you weren’t there.”

It’s not even a lie. 

Stiles scoffs, “That’s a statement of how much you like me. I don’t even appear in your wish-world.”

Derek frowns, a little annoyed even that Stiles misinterpreted his words. He doesn’t tell about Selena, about she felt wrong even if everything about her was so much Stiles. Derek says the truth when he insists that Stiles wasn’t there. 

“You made me come back, Stiles,” Derek says simply, because after all, what’s there to lose? Stiles is eerily still. “I wanted you to be there but you weren’t. And then you asked me to come back, so I did.”

“You left your family for…me?” Stiles echoes after a beat. He seems a little dazed. Derek picks at the lid of his coffee cup. 

“I figured it’s better to come back to a world of real, living people who are the closest thing to family I have now than living in a fake reality with fake-alive people, pretending everything is fine when really, it’s not,” Derek admits with a one-shoulder-shrug, and then he says, again, “You weren’t there.”

When Derek turns to look at Stiles, Stiles has his head leaned against the back rest and gazes straight at him. He doesn’t smirk or make any other sarcastic comment like Derek expected him to do—but then again, Stiles never does what Derek expects from him. 

Derek leans in and gently puts his mouth to Stiles’ pressing a kiss to his lips, revelling in the feeling of it. He sighs lightly when he feels Stiles’ fingers brushing through his hair and to his neck, stroking through the hairs of his nape, and then Stiles opens his mouth; and Derek knows that this is the right place for him to be.


End file.
